"Ellas" investigates the lives of four generations of women from Moya

As a curious note, Moyense families are usually matriarchal, especially because they belong to families that have lived in the countryside with many siblings with a majority of female presence who are characterized by being long-lived and strong women, who usually do not look their age. The exhibition, which opens today for Women's Day, deals, in the words of Sonsoles León herself, with giving visibility to these women and observing the changes that have been taking place over time in this northern municipality of Gran Canaria, covering the stories that go from the great-grandmother to the granddaughter. There are many more than are included and those that have not been able to enter this exhibition will be included in a book that will be published at the end of the year.

"Everything is based on the family burden of four generations that still last, giving the possibility for the granddaughter to get to know the great-grandmother better and vice versa," she clarifies. The exhibition is accompanied by some life texts of each of them that Echedey Medina has written, later converted into stories after conducting interviews in which each of them poetically reflects her memories of her. They In short, it reflects the life of the people of Moya through all these families of women whose lives accompany the photos of their faces. The matriarchs go in color as marking the line of the family and the others in black and white, always artistic, relating to each other.

Echedey Medina's texts can be more general as in an extract from the family of Maria del Carmen Jimenez Betancor. She recounts in her life story pointing out that "in a house full of siblings like the one I grew up in, the warmth of a home that can be called family has always been marked, and this has been learned by the different generations, we continue to meet as when I and my brothers lived in Los Tilos, because we have been a large family before, during and after». Or it may be more clearly feminist as in the family of Maria Guerra Suarez. In it, the text states that "I see the way in which we have created a bond of women who help each other, who talk, meet and take care of each other in my daughter: my daughter is everyone's daughter, a little of everyone, and that gives a feeling of a warmer and broader family, as if being a mother were always welcoming someone else, my mother has always been there, my grandmother, my aunts».

The photographs were taken at the same moment in which the photographs were taken to capture the magic of the moment with many complicit glances, smiles, or loving winks from the great-grandmother to the great-granddaughter. The age range is from 6 years to 98.

"Many of them have been left alone," adds the photographer. "Her husbands have died young, and she has carried the full weight of their families, their children, dedicating themselves to work, going out to the fields, pulling chestnuts out of the fire, without the help of their parents or siblings." Women who «have had to abandon power to fulfill themselves as a person for the care of their children, to educate them and feed them. Some have had resources, but others have had to cross ravines to work, experiencing hardships of all kinds », she clarifies. "And that is what cures women, since strength lies in not declining with five or six children under your care, although some even managed to study."

They are very beautiful stories, some sadder and others less so, "but above all it highlights the support and complicity among all the women, with the great sacrifice of the older daughters who have had to take care of their sisters." Obviously, the one who has had to suffer the most severe discrimination is the great-grandmother because she lived through a tougher time "and then everything changes as you see younger generations who have more rights and facilities," she points out.